Playwright Tracy Letts is best known for searing tales of dysfunction and psychological breakdown, such as the Pulitzer-winning August: Osage County and Bug, the latter of which was recently produced locally by Raleigh Ensemble Players. Yet his play Superior Donuts, currently playing at Deep Dish in Chapel Hill, is less a drama about doomed souls in a pitiful bake shop (The Glaze Man Cometh?) and more of an old-fashioned, well-crafted crowd-pleaser.

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Diagnosed with autism early in her childhood, Temple Grandin’s seemingly improbable success as an animal behavior scientist and designer of livestock-handling equipment has made her a bestselling author and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2010. Later today, the 63-year-old author, scientist and advocate will speak at Duke University for the talk “My Experience with Animals.”

Grandin, who received an honorary doctorate from Duke last year, spoke with us by telephone recently.

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Comedians are often friendly and thoughtful people in interviews, but rarely are they actually funny. But Emo Philips proves the exception to the rule, rambling off sometimes a dozen hilarious one-liners in the course of a single sentence.

Here, for example, is his explanation as to why he’s playing the NC Comedy Arts Festival at Cat’s Cradle:

“Well, about two years ago, I played Charlie Goodnight’s in Raleigh, and (festival creator) Zach Ward came up to me afterwards, and asked, ‘Would you like to play this festival?’ And I thought, ‘Boy, it’d be nice to play a slightly different market.’ Because Charlie Goodnight’s is amazing, but this festival is pretty far away, and it’s probably going to skew a tad younger, and it’s good to get the younger generation excited about me, because by the time I go back to Charlie Goodnight’s again they’ll all have families and they can afford me with their jobs working for the government, monitoring people’s thoughts or whatever we’ll be doing, I don’t know how technology is going. But then again, an asteroid might be heading toward Earth by 2036, so that takes the pressure off considerably.”

For a generation of comedy fans, Bobcat Goldthwait is known as that guy with the weird, grating, man-child voice—one he used to great effect alongside Bill Murray in Scrooged, John Cusack in One Crazy Summer and multiple Police Academy films as reformed gang leader Zed.

But in recent years, the once larger-than-life Goldthwait is keeping it small. He’s gone from the guy who once set The Tonight Show guest chair on fire to the acclaimed writer-director of the small-scale, ribald and pitch-black comedies Sleeping Dogs Lie and World’s Greatest Dad.